Awake
by summerlinde
Summary: No one Hannah asks about it can remember being awake when Neville wasn't. Not even once, since the day they moved into the Room of Requirement. Can she figure out how he's doing it? Updated to fix some spelling/grammar/formatting errors.


**This used to be in two parts, but I realized I liked it better as a oneshot because I feel like the continuity works better if it's read all at once, so I combined the two chapters. If you've read this before and you're wondering why it's shorter, it's not. It just got rearranged a little.**

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Hannah couldn't believe it had only been two weeks since she'd moved in. It seemed like forever. But maybe that was because it was better here, all wrapped up safe in the Room of Requirement with the rest of the DA. Something about it felt _right_, in a way that nothing else this year had been. It felt right to be all together, not scattered across the castle in steadily-emptying dorm rooms. Hannah's own room was just her and Leanne, now, with Susan's family in hiding since Christmas and the muggle-born students gone since the start of the year.

But now they were here, under their Hufflepuff banner with Ernie and Wayne and a few of their housemates from other years. The other DA members were right there, too, under their own house banners, and anyone else who needed protection. Even though their hammocks here weren't as comfortable as their beds in the dormitories, even though they didn't have their trunks with all their things or their own private spaces to keep things in, even though it could be terribly noisy when Seamus and Ernie and that third-year boy John all started snoring at once, it was still better to be together. It was better to be here.

And then, of course, there was Neville. Neville who had somehow, sometime, become a hero. And the funny thing was, the sixth and seventh years could talk about how surprising it was, but you'd never know it when the little ones looked over at him with their big eyes, like he was the most wonderful person they'd ever met.

She closed her eyes and she could still see him the way he'd been after the first time they'd used the cruciatus curse on him - she'd found him crying in a stairwell, closer to the Hufflepuff common room than he probably had any idea he was, and he'd been shaking so hard he couldn't even hold his wand up as she came nearer. But you'd never know it to see him now, cut up and battered and bruised and completely defiant, without a hint of fear. Sometimes she thought the only reason she could sleep at all was that Neville was here watching over them all.

He'd told her, when she found him, what had happened to his parents in the first war, and then it had been all she could see, sometimes, in his face - when the curse was used on him, or on his friends, or on the little ones, or, most memorably of all, when the Carrows had ordered him to use it on other students himself and he'd refused, point-blank, the bravest thing anyone had done all year - and she had wondered if that was what had made him brave. But then she remembered a thousand other things about him and she thought maybe he just _was_ brave. Maybe he had been for years, and it was just that no one had noticed.

He _had_ been fighting alongside Harry for the last three years, after all, ever since the D.A. had begun the first time around, hadn't he? And Dumbledore himself had called him brave when they were first years - she remembered, because that was how Gryffindor had won the house cup, and because Megan had giggled next to her at the thought of _Neville Longbottom _being brave.

But whatever it was, whether it was Neville changing or the people around him changing, she could hear them talking about him, when he wasn't around, and they would bring up things about him that she'd noticed absolutely ages ago as if they were new and unexpected things. It was most annoying when the other girls did it, because at least she'd noticed _before _he was a hero that his eyes were sort of remarkable - blue and green and brown all at once - and that he had freckles across his nose and that his hands were always perfectly steady when he needed them to be.

Granted, they hadn't spent nearly so much time as she had sharing a work space with him in Herbology, quietly beating everyone but Hermione to get the best grades in the class on nearly everything and repotting plants with perfect, gentle confidence. But still. It was annoying. The other girls _were_ right about one thing, though, which was that, once they'd pointed it out, Hannah had realized that she'd never seen him sleep - none of them had.

Actually, when she looked around, Neville didn't even have a _place _to sleep, and somehow, they'd never noticed. He was still awake when they went to sleep, no matter how late it got, and he was always awake when they woke up, no matter how early it was. When you woke from a nightmare, he was right there, glass of water in hand, as if he had been waiting for you to need him. He never looked tired, he never acted like it was an imposition, and he never failed to be there.

She'd woken up at least three times since she'd gotten here to find him sitting in one of the other hammocks with his arms full of 11-year-old, letting them cry out their nightmares into the front of his utterly unheroic sweater vest. She'd wanted to do the same herself, a few times, but he was different with the older kids than he was with the little ones.

A few nights after she'd joined the others here, she'd woken up with a jolt after dreaming that the Carrows had pushed her off the Astronomy tower, so that she fell down, down, down, like Dumbledore had. As she woke up, she'd fallen out of her hammock, actually fallen in real life, which had been utterly terrifying when she'd landed on the hard stone floor. Neville had been there in an instant, helping her to her feet, and he'd held her hand until she stopped shaking, and brought her a glass of water, and told her it would be alright.

She'd cried a little, though she didn't like admitting it, but he hadn't pulled her into his arms the way he did with the little kids. He'd kept his distance and handed her his handkerchief and he'd brushed the tears away himself, once, before seeming to think better of it.

When she'd asked her friends about it, they'd all traded stories of their own. He'd brought Leanne a glass of water, too, when she'd dreamed about Death Eaters attacking the school and woken up crying. And he was different with the guys, but he was there for them just as surely. Ernie had woken with a shout from a nightmare about the cruciatus curse to find Neville sitting calmly at the table off to the side, writing something out on a long piece of parchment, lit dimly by a single candle. Neville had looked up, Ernie had cleared his throat awkwardly, Neville had nodded, and that had been it - but even Ernie was willing to admit that it had been "nice to know the big guy was there." Just in case they needed him. Just in case something happened.

The night after they'd talked about Neville not sleeping, Hannah had decided to stay awake the whole night, pretending to be asleep so that he wouldn't wait up for her to nod off, and to watch until Neville slept. Just to make sure that he did. Because she was beginning to wonder if he might be some kind of superhuman. And then she fell asleep anyway, in spite of her best efforts to the contrary, and woke up early, instead, earlier than she ever had before.

The clock on the wall said it was 4 AM, everyone else was asleep, and Neville was leaning casually against the table, peering into a small round mirror, which floated in front of him as he shaved, cautiously, with an old-fashioned straight razor, keeping the blade carefully away from the cuts on his face. She watched through her eyelashes, almost hypnotized. His white uniform shirt was even rattier than most, these days, and it looked worse still without his usual sweater vest covering it, but with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows it somehow didn't matter.

She thought for a moment of the way he'd looked after his last, and worst, beating, the one that had driven him into hiding because he knew they'd kill him if he didn't. She thought about the way he'd looked dangling between Seamus and Ernie's shoulders, still glaring daggers at the Carrows with his jaw clenched so hard it had turned white, and she wished Ginny Weasley were still here.

Ginny had been the best at medical spells - "All those brothers," she said, but everyone knew that where she'd really gotten the practice was from watching her mother patch up Fred and George - and while they'd done what they could for Neville without her, Hannah could still see the last remnants of the beating and she suddenly wished, desperately, that she could make them go away. Maybe Ginny could have. Hannah couldn't.

She sat up, only to find Neville's eyes on her the moment she moved. "Oh!" he said softly, blushing slightly, "Sorry, I can duck into the loo . . ." He nodded toward the door to the boys' toilet (how he'd managed to convince the room to sprout two sets of toilets, one for the boys and one for the girls, no one knew, but he had, because nobody could use this room like Neville could).

She interrupted him before he could say anything else, getting carefully out of her hammock. "No! No, it's alright! I - I used to watch my dad shave in the mornings when we went camping in the summer. He'd lean on the boot of the car with his plastic razor and list off all the awesome things we were going to do that day, but I could never hear what he was saying because he was trying not to move his chin while he did it."

She wasn't sure why she was remembering that now - all year, Hogwarts (as it was now) and the rest of her life (both here and in the outside world) had seemed desperately far apart, like they might not even be parts of the same universe. And watching Neville scrape the last little bit of the fluffy magic shaving cream off his face with a long, gleaming blade was really nothing like watching her dad with his bar of soap and his chunk of plastic anyway. And not just because of his shaving implements.

She found herself blushing, suddenly, and folded her hands together in front of her, because she knew when her heart started thumping like this, her hands usually got a bit more fluttery than she really liked them to be. "Anyway, do you need a hand getting breakfast up here from the Hog's Head?" she asked.

Neville folded the razor closed, tucking both it and the mirror onto a shelf beside him which, when he thumped the wall over top of it with his fist, vanished entirely as if it were never there to begin with. "Sure! That would be great! It can be a bit much to carry sometimes, if Aberforth's not got much business in to distract him from feeding _us._"

By the time Hannah and Neville got back with breakfast, the other early risers were starting to get up - including Ernie, who raised an eyebrow at Hannah in a way she wasn't sure she liked. As she walked by him on the way to the bathroom to brush her teeth, she whispered fiercely "I'm _going _to catch him asleep sometime, just to prove he _sleeps_." As if that answered anything. Which she knew it didn't. It might even make things worse.

Either way, everyone else would be getting up soon, too, and then she could avoid Ernie entirely. Or at least, she could try. And then it would get to be late afternoon and they'd pull the books off the shelves again and teach each other whatever could be managed. Mostly, the only people who were really still learning much were the few first and second-years they'd rescued from the Carrows' torture, because almost anyone could teach them something new. It was harder with the older kids, and she and the other seventh years were more teachers than students, really. But it worked well enough, and it gave them something to do all day, and it was better than nothing.

Neville made a wonderful teacher, when he was teaching, very patient and unflappable and genuinely excited when someone finally got a spell right. But he usually didn't teach, because there was usually too much else to do. He would be peering into the foe-glass they kept on the top of the bookshelf or making lists of things they needed so that he wouldn't lose track of anything or planning out raids into the rest of the castle to help the kids who were still out there. Or he worked on finding a safe way to get news in and out, his biggest project.

Owls weren't going to cut it, but they all wanted their families to know they were ok - listening to Potterwatch on the wireless would tell them if their families were alright or not - and they were all desperate to get word out in the other direction. Neville was working on the problem non-stop. And then every few days, he locked everything down safe and went to rescue a few more people with whatever small group of others could convince him that they should come too, and everyone left behind stayed on pins and needles until he got back, never feeling safe until he was home again, even if they were.

She managed to avoid Ernie for most of the day, mostly because it was a mission day and Ernie had finally convinced Neville that he should go along. Neville, Ernie, Seamus, and Padma all went this time around, even though Neville usually preferred not to go with a group larger than two or three. It had turned out to be lucky, though, because the longer the D.A. stayed in hiding, the harder the Carrows cracked down, and they'd ended up having to rescue a first year, two third years, and a fourth year from a room in the dungeons near the Potions classroom. The Carrows had left them there, with no apparent intention of letting them out again or feeding them anything until they agreed to tell the whole school they'd been lying about muggles being people, too.

As she met them all at the door, getting the new kids in quickly and setting out the remnants of dinner for them as the room expanded to add four new hammocks, she realized it would be another long night - but maybe she could still stay up to see if Neville slept.

By the time everyone had crowded around the new kids to find out what their names were and what had happened to them and told them it was going to be alright a dozen times each and dragged them off to bed in their new hammocks with their new friends, Hannah was exhausted. In part, she was tired because she'd woken so early. In part, it was because no matter how safe they felt here in their hideout the fact that they were hiding at all was the kind of stressful that drained you completely. But she was determined to stay awake this time, and so stay awake she did, sliding one arm under the other so that she could pinch herself to stay awake without the motion being visible.

The other kids drifted off to sleep and Neville finished writing out whatever it was he was working on at the table and rolled up his piece of parchment and put it in another one of the vanishing shelves he seemed to favor. Then he moved to the middle of the room, closed his eyes, tipped his head back, and took a deep breath, like she did sometimes when she got that pinched feeling in her chest that meant she might cry. And then he opened them again, walked straight past the Gryffindor wall with its neat row of hammocks, and punched the wall next to it gently, so close to the door to the castle that she was almost afraid someone walking in the corridor might hear. But no. The room would never allow them to be heard from the outside. Neville wouldn't let it.

A single hammock, plainer than their cheerful ones and more utilitarian, dropped from nowhere and Neville clambered into it after one last, long look around the room. He _did_ sleep! But then - how did he get there so fast when you needed him? And . . . if Neville was asleep, then who was watching out for them? Hannah began to wonder if she might rather have just kept thinking Neville never slept. She began to think she might have felt safer that way.

Well, she decided after a moment, she'd just have to keep them safe _herself _for a while. It was only fair, after all, wasn't it? Neville had been keeping her safe for weeks, building this room up so that no one else could get in, keeping everyone fed and protected, easing them through nightmares, even, apparently, sleeping between everyone else at the door, as if he could only rest when he was literally protecting them with his own body. She pinched herself again, watching the light flicker from the one dim candle Neville had left burning on the table.

Now that she thought of it, she couldn't remember a night without that one last candle, either. It was like her nightlight had been when she was small. And she might have expected to mind, because she wasn't, after all, a child anymore. But she didn't. It was nice. And it was something to look at as she forced herself awake.

Just as she was about to doze off, it happened. Neville's bed began to rock back and forth, silently, drawing her attention as she glanced across the room again, hoping if she kept looking at things it would keep her from falling asleep. He sat up quickly, pulling himself out of bed as if he'd gotten hours of sleep instead of about 45 minutes. A faint light appeared over one of the hammocks a few yards away from hers, too faint to wake even the lightest sleeper, but enough for her to see it - and enough for Neville to see it, too, because when the brand-new Ravenclaw first-year jerked upright in her hammock, he was right there beside her.

"Hey. Hey, you were having a nightmare." Neville's voice barely carried across the space of the room, but the little she could hear of it was warm and gentle.

The girl shuddered so hard that Hannah could see the hammock shake even in the dim light of the one candle. "I know."

Neville summoned a glass of water silently with a wave of his wand, which Hannah hadn't even realized he had with him until right then. But of course he had it. She shouldn't be surprised. Neville - well, watching him like this, maybe he really _was_ Superman. He handed the girl the glass of water and she took it like it was a lifeline. "Here. Just breathe. You're gonna be ok, now. We've got you now."

As soft as Neville's voice was, she could still hear a few other people stirring at the sound. She glanced around to see who it was, but Neville was focused on the task at hand - taking care of this one poor little girl who needed his help. "Do you think you can fall asleep again? Because I can stay right here if you need me to. Sometimes it helps to know you're not alone."

The girl handed back the water glass. "Nah. I got this. I used to have bad dreams a _lot _when I was little. And anyway, I'm not a baby."

Hannah was a baby. She was even willing to admit it. She'd held onto Neville's hand for an awfully long time after her own nightmare, after all, so long that she'd been almost completely asleep again before she'd let go. Or maybe she hadn't been such a baby at all. Maybe she'd just wanted to hold his hand. It was all starting to blur together now, wanting and needing, and the longer she stayed here, the more confusing it got. But that was probably alright, too. If it wasn't, she at least couldn't summon up the energy to worry about it right now.

Neville took the water glass back, patted the girl on the shoulder, and whispered "Good night, Lindsey," because of _course _he knew her name already, even if Hannah had forgotten. Neville might have been born for this, unable to remember even the basics of the layout of Hogsmede without someone else giving him directions and losing his many lists about a dozen times a day so that he had to hunt them down, but never, ever forgetting a name. He went into the boys' toilet and the water ran for a little bit in the sink, splashing as he rinsed the glass out.

As Neville came back through the room, he checked first on Lindsey, and then on everyone else, walking softly down each row of hammocks. Hannah shut her eyes and forced her breathing to slow down well before he got near her, but when his hand brushed her shoulder, she wasn't actually surprised. She opened her eyes again to find Neville smiling at her in a whole new way she'd never seen him smiling before, which given how long he'd been her preferred tablemate for Herbology, was a bit surprising. "Thanks for staying up, Hannah. It's really ok, though. I promise it is. The room will wake me up if anybody needs me. Or if everybody needs me. Or if Snape finds a way through I haven't thought of. Or anything. Really anything."

She grabbed his hand before she could stop herself. "Neville, just - don't die for us." She wasn't sure where that had come from, the words springing unbidden to her lips, but as soon as she said it, she knew she'd meant it. "I know you're not planning to, exactly, but we all know you would. Could. But don't. Sleep by the door, wake up at the drop of a hat, do all the dangerous things yourself, just - don't die."

He raised the back of her hand to his lips, kissing her knuckles. "I can't promise that. But I'll try." It was maybe enough. Maybe.

She nodded. "Try." And then they met each other's eyes, and she knew all of a sudden that he wasn't going to move again until she was asleep. And maybe, maybe that was ok. Because he was going to try not to die. Just like the rest of them. And it was going to have to be enough. Because Neville said it was. And somehow, when he said things, she believed them. She drifted off to sleep surprisingly fast, fingers hooked through Neville Longbottom's, and she had no nightmares. But even if she had, she thought as she woke up to the hustle and bustle of breakfast, Neville overloaded with several baskets of muffins as everyone else huddled around him, it wouldn't have mattered. He'd have been there anyway.


End file.
